Avicii – Wake Me Up Video Analysis

All right, so this video has been floating around for a while now and other than a dear friend and I, no one has really commented on the video or what it is all about. So today, I figured that we would take a few moments and go through the video step by step and show what the creators of this video are basically portraying. Here at SongFreaks, we like to make sure that people understand the “true meaning” of not only the song through its lyrics, but also the video and the weird creative directions it may take.

But first, watch the whole video and see if anything seems… unusual.

As you can see, the video starts out with an attractive girl in what seems to be a “hick town” in the 30s, where everyone except for her (and her younger sister) are unattractive and boring. The video even goes as far as to dress the two girls in “hip modern clothing,” while everyone else in their town looks more like they are trying to get through the great depression. In this scene everyone in the town seems to be obsessed with the girls and staring at them as they walk through the town. Creepy.

“They don’t like us.”

“Yeah I know.”

“Why?”

Hugging ensues.

Next is where the video gets interesting. Just to recap: so far we have a town where everyone is unattractive and they don’t like the two stars of the video because they are, in fact, attractive and therefore not accepted in their town.

Now we move to the older sister jumping on her horse – that’s right, she jumps on a horse, not into a vehicle, thus furthering the 30s theory – and rides off into the sunset. After riding for a while the girl comes to a city, which appears to be a ghost town.

Side note: Did anyone else notice the shameless promotion where “Ralph Lauren Denim Supply Co.” is written on the wall? Well it is, at 2:11, and for those of you who don’t know, Avicii is currently their poster boy.

Now cue another attractive girl walking by, where they both turn to look back at each other and revel in their beauty. Nope, it’s not over yet – another attractive person shows up and they all pile into an old pickup truck. Can anyone guess where they’re going?

Well if you guessed that they were headed to see Avicii performing his set at Ultra, then you guessed right! They pop up surrounded by exclusively attractive people at Miami’s premier EDM festival, Ultra – where Avicii originally released wake me up.

After the concert scene we cut back to the girl riding here horse back to her town. She tells her younger sister (who she left overnight alone, and who looks to be about 12) to pack her things ‘cause they’ve found where they belong.

What You Should Take Away From This Video:

1. If you think you are beautiful, you better listen to Avicii.

2. If you don’t listen to Avicii, you’re not beautiful.

3. If you’re attractive and go to a city, random strangers will pick you up and take you to an EDM event where you can magically skip the line and stay there all night.

4. The distance you can travel on a horse is vast and can actually result in time travel.

5. The director was clearly not concerned about the possibility of people analyzing this video.

Thanks for taking the time to read; if you have anything you would like to add (or even argue) we would love to hear from you! Leave a comment or hit us up on our Facebook or Twitter!

What do you think about Avicii – Wake Me Up Video Analysis?

POSTING COMMENT...

When I had my daughter I moved back tomy home town. It is approximately 500 people and everyone there was behind in the evolution of time in the sense they do as their parents did and their grandparents. They are farmers, they attend church regularly, they follow the same moral pattern that was set by the generations before them. Whe I moved back and had my daughter, I felt like we were looked at the way the people look at the two girls in the video simply because I had "broken the rules". Not just by having a daughter who's father is black (and has nothing to do with her sinc2 before her birth and the only black person in town) but also for talk7ng about "spirituality" not christianity, hitchhiking, growing dreads, dressing sifferent, and so on....after three years of not feeling like i fit in and yearning to find a place i could call home i packed everything that would fit in my car with my daughter and headed west not knowing where I was going but having faith I was going to find where I belong. And I did. When I saw th7s video it brought on a few tears because it was like watching me and my little girl.

A beautiful, unmarried woman with a small child that appears to have been born out of wedlock arrives in a backwards, poverty-stricken town. The townsfolk take an instant disliking to her because she is free and they are slaves who are asleep and do not know they are lost.

Hate = fear of competition. She is a threat to the established moral order. She is a danger to the status quo. Can you imagine all the trouble she's going to cause? She might STEAL husbands from their wives, STEAL sons from their mothers, STEAL men away from doing their duties. She might influence the girls with her loose morals and sexual deviance. She cannot stay. Every power-broker in the town will know that SHE HAS TO GO.

What is her crime? She is beautiful and unattached. At any point in the last 6000 years and continuing in the 'modern' era, that is a crime that can get a woman killed if she won't (or can't) leave.

Is it possible to STEAL a human with free will? Or would you be stealing a slave? Marriage = Slavery. Exclusive love = hate. If you disagree, you are wrong but don't feel bad; you're only wrong by something like a billion to one.

Humans only know what they've been told or shown and slaves will never know they are slaves (or they would free themselves). Humans have been enslaved by lies but you can't find yourself until you know that you're lost.

If you look deeper you can notice that both girls have Avicii's logo on their arms. The logo may mean that they are special or simply different; which explains why they dress differently and get thousands of looks on the streets.

The people in the first town stare at them because they think that having the logo means being bad or not like veryone else, sort of like being classified as a Divergent in the book by Veronica Roth. As the older sister is tired of being looked at because of her sign, she sets off into a journey to find people that accept them by who they are and what they represent. When she finds the second town she sees that everyone has the same sign, meaning they too are different and were once rejected. All of the people in the second town could have been tired of getting weird looks as well, so they moved to a ghost town and took it as their new home. That is why they are happy to see the new sisters.

i think what Avicii is saying is that finding your place in the world is important, and that you have to be strong and hold on until you find it, just like the two girls in their first home.